RAPID FIRE: James Swallow Talks The Buried Dagger

Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with Black Library authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.

For this instalment I spoke to veteran Black Library author James Swallow about The Buried Dagger, his latest Horus Heresy novel – the 54th and final book in the main-range series! As befits the book that closes off the Horus Heresy this is a somewhat longer interview than usual, so settle down with a mug of recaff and enjoy!

As usual, let’s get straight to the questions and James’ answers.

Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The Buried Dagger?

James Swallow: It’s essentially two stories running in parallel, the first of which is the story which a lot of people have been waiting to see – the ‘Fall of the Death Guard’. It’s the Death Guard becalmed in the Warp, facing the challenge of either dying horribly or planting their standard next to Nurgle.

The other narrative stream involves Garro and the Knights Errant on Terra. It’s the eve of the Siege and the Knights Errant, and Malcador too, are literally waiting for Horus’ ships to make the sky turn black.

These two narratives are running parallel with each other, thematically crossing over with Death Guard on both sides of the fence, as it were.

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?

JS: On the one side of the narrative we’ve got Mortarion and Calas Typhon, who’s become an increasingly important character as the Heresy has gone on. He’s been connected to the Chaos gods in a much more fundamental way than people realise. We see snapshots of Mortarion’s life as a young man growing up on Barbarus, and all the challenges he faces, so there’s a sense of where Mortarion is at this particular moment in the Heresy, but also where he’s come from and why he makes the choices he makes. It’s about the two of these characters representing the two poles around which the Death Guard can exist.

On the other side of the story we have Malcador, Garro and the other Knights Errant – including Loken, Varren and Rubio. Malcador’s dealing with all of the issues he has about how the Knights Errant are going to progress forward as he constructs what will eventually become the Grey Knights, and attempting to prepare for the greater war to come. Straight-arrow Garro is in the middle of all of this, and as he’s always been doing right from the beginning he’s trying to find his path. I’ve always seen him as a seeker – he’s looking for the right thing to do, and how he can move through these events and do the right thing. He’s trying to fight the bad guys but also figure out how to maintain the honesty and truth of his soul.

These Terra-bound sections are pretty much linear, and set in the days before the Siege of Terra takes place. As we get towards the end of the book Horus’ fleet has breached the edge of the Sol system. The defenders are looking up into the sky thinking “here we go!” The air raid sirens are going off, and there’s a distant storm on the horizon – Horus is on his way, all bets are off, and we’ve officially started the Siege of Terra from this point onwards.

During the course of this narrative Malcador, Garro and the Knights Errant are dealing with their own issues – the panic that’s taking place on Terra with cultist groups rising up, some of which are being suborned by agents of Horus. They’re being pulled in different directions and trying to keep a lot of plates spinning even while Horus is breathing down their necks.

ToW: What should fans make sure they’ve read or listened to before reading this, to make sure they’re up to speed?

JS: This is Garro’s and Mortarion’s stories, so if you want to get the full gist of it read The Flight of the Eisenstein and Garro: Weapon of Fate, and that will set up all the characters you need to see. There’s also my short story Exocytosis, which leads directly into Typhon’s first appearance in this narrative. You don’t need to read that one, but if you’re after a little extra tone and flavour to understand where his character is when you first see him then that would be a good one to drop in there too.

ToW: Why this story? What made you want to write this in particular?

JS: I have to set the ‘way back machine’ for this! Way back when, I was offered the chance to write The Flight of the Eisenstein and I loved writing about the Death Guard and helping to flesh out the character of Nathaniel Garro. When I got to the end of the novel I felt like I’d really enjoyed writing about him, but I put the character on the board and said to the other writers “here’s this guy, if anyone else wants to pick him up and put him in another story that’s fine”.

Everybody was off doing their other things, though, so nobody picked up Garro. Fans kept asking me if I was going to tell another Garro story as they wanted to know what happened to him and where he goes next, and at the same time we were doing some of these audio drama projects. It was a perfect storm of events because Black Library said to me “you like doing audio, and we don’t really have any Heresy audio stuff yet, but you’ve got this character who people like to see – why don’t we make him the Horus Heresy audio guy? As Loken is the viewpoint character in a lot of the novels, why don’t we make Garro the viewpoint character in the Heresy audios?”

That was a great idea, so we did that and I wrote a few of the audio drama stories, which became Nathaniel Garro’s thing – threading through the Heresy in these one-shot audio stories. A lot of people like to read the stories in prose too so eventually we decided that we’d compile all of the stories and do what’s called a ‘bind-up’, which is where you take all the scripts and essentially novelise them. I took the novella Vow of Faith and all the audio dramas and turned them into one big book – Garro: Weapon of Fate.

There was no grand plan at the beginning. People assume we had everything planned out on some giant spreadsheet, but we really didn’t! It was just what felt right at the time. The Garro bind-up felt like the middle movement of his story – so if The Flight of the Eisenstein was the opening of this tale and Weapon of Fate was the middle, I wondered where would it conclude? If you look at Garro’s arc throughout the series, his connection with the Death Guard, the Knights Errant and what would eventually become the Grey Knights, all of those plot threads needed to be brought together and that story needed to be told.

We also talked a while back about doing the ‘Fall of the Death Guard’ as a graphic novel, like Macragge’s Honour. In the end we decided not to go down that route, but of course that story still needed to be told. We had these two story elements so I thought that if we ran the two together as an interleaved story then that novel would feel like something with weight to it. It felt like this was a story we needed to tell, and it ended up being the perfect story to be the final Horus Heresy novel before the Siege. It’s like the curtain falling before the intermission – when the curtain comes back up it’s going to be the Siege of Terra.

It was just a case of everything being in the right place at the right time, and it felt like this would be the right place to tell these stories.

ToW: What were your main influences when writing it?

JS: Mostly just the work of my fellow writers, really. This far in, after 54 novels – that’s a lot, right? I don’t know of any other series that has so many different writers and which has gone on for so long and done so much. To maintain that tone, and the strength and power of narrative, it’s been a supreme team effort. That’s one of the coolest things about working on this project, working with so many really great writers. Nobody wants to be the one who lets the side down, everyone’s trying to do their best and bring their A-game to this. We all want to tell the best stories we can.

Being ‘in the room’ with all the talented writers who work on these books makes you want to tell better stories. It’s like when you get musicians who are just jamming and then they suddenly come up with a tune, and something great is created – I think there’s a similar sort of thing with writers where we bounce ideas off each other. You don’t just end up with idea plus idea, it ends up more like idea squared! You stimulate each other to create really cool narratives, and there’s a lot of that going on with the Heresy.

So I drew from the work of my peers, but again I always go back to the source. I have some of the very early lore, even some of the stuff that’s since been rendered apocryphal or overwritten, and I’d piece through it to find the really interesting little references. It’s often a case of finding the stuff that’s woven into the very core of this narrative and drawing it back out, figuring out how to bring it back and make all of it make sense.

The thing is, we’ve got readers who are very loyal to us, who have been with us from the very beginning, and we have to be respectful of the amount of time, energy and money these fans have put into reading the books. The deal that’s been made with us as the writers is that the fans will give us their time and energy and in return we’ll give them the best damn stories we can, and hopefully we can try to reveal something new. One of the key things about the Heresy is that everybody knows how it ends – it’s like Titanic, you know the ship is going to hit the iceberg – but what you don’t know is how it gets there and what happens to people along the way.

Everything we’ve tried to do with the Heresy is to present facts you thought you knew and show that it did happen like that, but also here’s something else that happened which you didn’t know about. That thing you thought was true? You’ll see that in a different way, you’ll realise that it’s not incorrect it just means something else, and that there’s more to the narrative than you ever knew.

ToW: How does the final product compare to your original concept? Has anything changed much from your first ideas?

JS: I don’t think much changed, no. I tend to plot quite heavily so I’ll always have a strong roadmap, even though some of the fuzzy areas might grow and change. I mean, Mortarion was a character I really liked, but it was hard to get a handle on him. I felt like he grew in the writing, and I really got into who he was as the story went on, so I ended up going back later on to change some of my earlier descriptions and make things flow together nicely.

Generally, though, it was pretty much the story I decided to write from the beginning.ToW: How does this story compare to the rest of your work? Is it a familiar style, or a departure?

JS: I think there’s a sense of fatalism about this novel, because of where it’s placed. In the space of the narrative it’s in this place where everything is about to go to hell, figuratively and literally! There is a dark, dark shadow hanging over the entire narrative of this book. Usually I think my writing is a bit more hopeful, even when I’m writing about the grimdark future, so you might find that this one’s a little more bleak. Strangely though, in a way there’s a light at the end of the tunnel because it’s setting up things for the final climax of the narrative – the Siege of Terra.

ToW: There’s a nice symmetry to where this book comes in the series – you kicked off the main body of the series after the opening trilogy, and now you’re closing it off before the Siege. Did that add any addition pressure or excitement to the writing of this, for you?

JS: There’s always pressure writing Heresy books! I’ve always said the Horus Heresy is like the crown jewels of the Warhammer mythology, it’s the wellspring from which the entire Warhammer 40,000 universe springs. None of us [the Heresy authors] were ignorant of that, none of us were casual or glib or cavalier about it. We knew it was serious, and that we could not afford to screw it up, because we’re fans – we all love this background and we all wanted to do it the justice it deserves. We all feel the weight of how important this series is, and we want to do the best job we can, so there’s always that kind of pressure.

Certainly for me, writing this book came at a very tough time in my life. I was having a really bad year with different issues going on, so there was a lot of personal pressure on me and a lot of writing pressure. At the time it was really hard-going writing this book and it felt like a struggle, but when I got to the end I realised that all of the energy from what had been going on in my life had expressed itself through the book. In a way it was therapeutic for me. I remember when I handed it in to Nick Kyme he said ‘this is one of the best things you’ve ever done’, and I thought ‘really?’ I was so deep into it and I couldn’t tell if I had done a good job with it – I just had to do the best job I felt I could do, and I think at the end of it all of the energy, all of the issues…all of that comes out.

ToW: Are you planning on writing more about any of these characters, before the end of the Heresy?

JS: Yeah, there are a couple of short stories which tie in with The Buried Dagger. There’s a story called Lantern’s Light which is part of the 2019 Black Library birthday celebrations, and which is something I wanted to do but couldn’t fit into the novel. I wanted to have Mortarion and the Emperor pretty much just sit around and have a chat! I just wanted to put the two of them in a room and have that play out, because I think there’s some really interesting dynamics in there. You see the seeds of this conversation in the novel, when Mortarion first meets the Emperor, but this is set afterwards.

I think it’s something we haven’t seen before. We hear about how the Emperor turns up and finds a lost primarch, but then the next thing we see is usually the primarch off on the Crusade doing stuff! I thought it can’t happen that quickly, it can’t be that easy – what’s the transition like? What actually happens when the Emperor turns up and says ‘right, you’re coming with me…and by the way here’s an entire legion for you, and also a nice set of armour and some guns…off you go”? How would that affect Mortarion, as someone who’s lived an entire life on Barbarus? How would he react to this completely different life which he has to just pick up and go? So part of the story is that, and part of it is his conflicted emotions towards the Emperor as well.

The other story is called The Chamber at the End of Memory, which is a Rogal Dorn story featured in the Scions of the Emperor event anthology. It’s Dorn on Terra trying to shore up all the defences of the Imperial Palace and make sure everything’s ready. It was interesting for me to write about Dorn because he’s a character I’ve only touched on once or twice – to get inside his head and ask what it’s like to be the guy who’s nailing the boards over the windows and wondering whether it’s enough. He’s waiting and waiting for this cataclysmic battle, but does he have any doubts?

In amongst all that he accidentally finds something which he’s not supposed to find. He stumbles upon something by mistake that’s been lost for a very long time…and that’s all I’m going to say about that!

ToW: Are you working on anything else for the Heresy, or Black Library in general?

JS: Right now, nothing! I’ve just finished off that last short story, and I’m going to be talking with Black Library very soon about what to do next. I have an idea for a Garro audio story that I want to do, which I think would be the final Garro story in the Horus Heresy, and I really want to write that – it’s something I’ve been talking about for years. Even after The Flight of the Eisenstein I thought ‘well that’s where his story begins, but this will be the last story we tell about Garro in the Heresy’. That’ll be that, the very end of his character arc throughout the Horus Heresy.

I did an audio drama called Corsair: The Face of the Void for Warhammer 40,000, which was essentially written as a pilot episode for an ongoing series. That’s done reasonably well and I’m hoping that Black Library will be interested in having me do more of those, so that’s something we’ve been talking about and there are a few ideas floating around about whether I would write two or three of them or whether we might even assemble a team of other writers and do it like a TV show! That would be really fun.

None of this has been officially contracted of course, but beyond that we’ve been having ongoing discussions around the Sanguinius Primarchs novel, which is something I’ve said for a long time that I’d love to write. I’ve been working for a while to try and figure out a way to do that, because it feels to me that these novels have to be the definitive tome about that character. That’s a big ask, and it’s a tall order to try and get that right, but just recently I’ve come up with an outline which I think is interesting, and is a unique take on it. We’ll see!

ToW: You write plenty outside of Black Library as well, so what’s keeping you busy elsewhere?

JS: Yeah, I’ve been writing a series of contemporary action thrillers, the Marc Dane series, which have been doing really well. The third book in the series – Ghost – just came out at Christmas in paperback. It’s great to see that a lot of my Black Library fanbase have been coming across and picking it up, and being really supportive, and I really appreciate that. It’s so nice to know that fans will come over and read something from a different genre.

The next book in the series – Shadow – is coming out at the end of May, and I’ve just finished putting together the proofs on that. There will be a couple more books after that; I’m going to be doing one of those a year for the next couple of years.

I’ve also just completed work on a comics project, which I can’t say much more about at this point. That’s been really exciting for me because I’ve always loved comics, ever since I was a kid, but I’ve never got the opportunity to do one. I’ve had a whole slew of near misses and come this close before, but finally this year the opportunity landed in my lap. I’ve had an absolute blast doing that, so I’m looking forward to talking more about it in the months ahead.

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Massive thanks to James for taking the time to answer these questions so thoroughly! If you’re a Horus Heresy fan then I suspect you’ll want to go out and order The Buried Dagger right away, but if you’re still undecided keep an eye out for my review very soon.

Click here to order The Buried Dagger.

Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.